Barroso takes step back from brink

JosE Manuel Barroso will attempt to get MEPs to support a reshuffled version of his European Commission in less than three weeks’ time, after withdrawing his first team yesterday (27 October) to avoid rejection by the European Parliament.

The president-elect of the Commission will use the signing ceremony for the EU constitution in Rome tomorrow (29 October) and next week’s EU summit (4-5 November) to ask some government leaders to withdraw their nominees and send new candidates.

The most likely scenario is that he will ask member states’ leaders to replace two or three nominees and reassign portfolios within the team with a view to presenting the revamped team to Parliament’s plenary session on 17 November.

An aide to the former Portuguese prime minister said last night that he had not imposed on himself any deadline but “already people are saying it should be sooner rather than later”.

The vote could, however, be delayed to the Parliament’s December plenary session, if government leaders drag their feet over putting forward new nominees. In the meantime, Romano Prodi’s Commission will continue as a caretaker administration.

The stickiest issue in any reshuffle will be the future of Rocco Buttiglione, the commissioner-designate for justice, freedom and security, who has outraged a majority in the assembly with controversial comments on homosexuality and women.

But ditching him may not be enough. The largest group in the Parliament, the European People’s Party (EPP-ED), is indicating that it will press for other commissioners to be moved to different posts from those originally allocated or removed altogether.

They include Neelie Kroes (competition), Mariann Fischer Boel (agriculture), Ingrida Udre (taxation) and László Kovács (energy), who have either been embroiled in controversy, or performed poorly in the Parliamentary hearings.

“The hunt has now started,” one Parliament insider said. “Buttiglione will be the first to fall, but at least one Socialist nominee and maybe also a Liberal one, Kroes or Fischer Boel, will fall with him,” he added.

Poul Nyrup Rasmussen, the MEP, former Danish prime minister and president of the Party of European Socialists, warned Barroso against “mere minor change”. “There has to be a deep-seated reshuffle with four to five commissioners being moved to other posts,” he said.

Austrian centre-right deputy Paul Rübig said that “other commissioners, not just Buttiglione, were criticized at their hearings and Barroso should now consider moving them too”.

Sources close to Barroso say that he did not move Buttiglione to a different post or sack him to please the Socialists, because he was aware that this would not be acceptable to the EPP-ED. “He knew that he should either do a big reshuffle or not touch it at all. Otherwise, by trying to placate the Socialists, he would upset the EPP-ED,” one Commission official said.

“He told MEPs on the eve of the planned vote that he had his hands tied and they misunderstood him. They thought that was because of government leaders; but he meant his hands were tied up by Parliament’s political groups and their in-fighting,” he added.

Some members of his designated Commission sought to put a positive spin on the unprecedented turn of events. Luxembourg’s Viviane Reding, a member of the Prodi Commission who had been appointed to the information society portfolio in the next, said: “This is good for European democracy. Barroso has not been damaged and now has the chance to come up with an even stronger Commission team.”

Neil Kinnock, an outgoing vice-president of the Commission, said: “There is no crisis but there might have been if Barroso had not acted so effectively. This is now a manageable problem, rather than a crisis.”

But Barroso confessed to European Voice that his mandate “had not got off to the best of starts”.